


memory serves

by templemarker



Series: love + rhetoric + blood [1]
Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Canon Disabled Character, Depression, Disabled Character, Mental Health Issues, Monsters, Podfic Available, canon-typical suicidal references, fuck me what a tag, it's not NOT quentin-eliot, q could really use that filliorian opium right about now, they're always in the background
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-28
Updated: 2019-03-28
Packaged: 2019-12-25 15:04:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18263768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/templemarker/pseuds/templemarker
Summary: But this is far from the first time Quentin has sat in a room with a monster that has a vested interest in fucking Quentin up from the inside out.





	memory serves

**Author's Note:**

> Er...this is not what I meant to write. Oh well. 
> 
> Sort of 4x07ish, 4x08? I guess anywhere from 4x04 to 4x08, really. Please note this piece engages with Quentin's mental health consonant with the show's canon; check the tags to see if it's your speed.
> 
>  **ETA:** Now with [podfic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18275405) if that's more your speed. ::hands::

The thing is, it's not like Quentin doesn't have prior experience with this. 

Sure, okay, this time the monster is outside of his own neurochemistry and wearing the face of the love of his life and casually murdering dozens of people without giving two fucks about plastering Eliot's face all over the world's surveillance footage and almost certainly branding him a top-ten watchlist serial killer. Sure. But this is far from the first time Quentin has sat in a room with a monster that has a vested interest in fucking Quentin up from the inside out. 

The first time, Quentin was thirteen. Maybe it was something about puberty, fuck knows he's been through every speculative psycho-analytic wringer out there trying to pinpoint a start for it; but Quentin was thirteen and the distance between his bed and the door one night became equivalent to the yawning chasm of the Grand Canyon. 

His dad had planned a whole vacation around it, Grand Canyon, Yosemite, the works. They didn't go. Quentin spent that summer vacation being shuffled around from one child psychologist to the next pediatric psychiatrist until he had leveled up to "case manager" and his parents stopped talking to each other. 

They gave him all kinds of tools to try and describe it, "tick these boxes", "draw your feelings", "tell me what makes you happy, Quentin". There wasn't a way to describe it. There never has been. Shitty metaphors that are too hard to formulate anyway when he's in the thick of it, proverbial black cloud fogging up the glass and crawling over his skin. He never has the energy to fight it. 

They get somewhere with medication after that summer, trial after trial until they find something that kind of works, that gets him to school and gets his homework done and makes Julia, irrepressible Julia who is shining way too bright for his eyes or his heart, earnestly share _how glad we are that you're doing better, Q, it was really scary_ over lattes and chocolate cookies he's never hungry enough to eat. 

Then again at 15; again at 18, and he's taking a semester-long sabbatical; again at 21 and then swiftly, cruelly, at 22 when the meds just cut him off at the knees for no reason. Them's the biochemistry breaks, kid. 

So he's twenty-two and he's been living with a monster for almost ten years and then, magic happens. Brakebills and Physical Kids and glass menageries, Alice and _magic_ and Welters and Margo and _Eliot_. 

He stops his meds because the Dean says with cool authority that Magic Will Fix Things, by which is meant Quentin. 

Quentin is not fixed. He resumes his medication. 

Sure, it was kind of unique being locked in his own head by the woman he loved for a decade and a half, doomed to go truly batshit crazy in the funhouse mirror of his own neuroses. That was a trip, but also a Tuesday; it was hardly the first time he'd looked in a mirror and wondered if the reality around him was about to shatter. Just the first time it was spurred by someone outside, instead of the monster inside his head. 

And yeah, it was a drag seeing his depression take his own face, taunt him with everything he's been hearing on repeat for the last ten years like the worst kind of trip, MDMA sparking off citalopram mixed with a really dumb hit of sativa. Classic. _Just do it, Quenin_ , sure, nothing that hasn't crossed his mind a hundred times, only getting near it, really, that one time. 

All this hash-the-past deal is to say: this is not the first time Quentin has been alone with a monster that is hyperfocused on him. 

_Hello darkness my old friend_ ; it only ever works as a meme if it stubs that edge of truth. Hello darkness; my friend. 

The hardest part isn't the monster. The hardest part isn't the permanent fight-or-flight, it's not even that this monster is wearing Eliot like a rented suit -- how it would offend Eliot's sensibilities to be worn so cheaply and with such little care -- no. 

The hardest part is that Quentin is getting used to this. 

He heard a line once, some HBO thing James was way into during undergrad: "Semper Gumby, always flexible." That's what it's like: Quentin folding and flexing into these cramped crawl spaces, stretching and molding to fit into whatever hideous situation is coming for them next. Sure, he's still taking his meds, picks them up at the Duane Reade with a forever-forward-dated script he charmed from his last one. Who has time to see a psych for a med refill when cleaning blood splatter takes up so many hours? 

So there's the meds, but the best they're doing is making sure there's a rope bridge across the chasm. The thing the meds have going for them is that they're keeping him up off the floor. Somedays the floor sounds like a better option, but then the monster beside his bed turns his head and for an awful charged moment he looks like Eliot, only a moment: before it's back to Looney Tunes and chicharrón and the traumatic deaths of half the supermarket line out of idle amusement. 

In his whole life as a patient, shuffling in and out of clinics, only one doc ever got it. It's never about the darkness, never about the monster. It's not about the demons that have to be wrestled, or the voice in the back of the mind, or the fun panoply of co-morbid conditions that accompany major depressive disorder like ducklings in a row. "Hey, you made it," she said, although Quentin can't remember her name; she was gone the next time he went in. "You made it through another day. You fought like hell to keep breathing. You're still here."

Quentin will always fight for one more day. 

One more day, next to the monster; one more day to get to Eliot; one more day. One more. 

Quentin's been sitting with a monster all his life. What's one more.

**Author's Note:**

> "So you've survived 100% of your worst days. You're doing great." -- Norm Kelly
> 
> Further author's notes available on [Dreamwidth](https://templemarker.dreamwidth.org/55055.html). 
> 
> If you liked it please consider [reblogging](https://templemarker.tumblr.com/post/183788338002/memory-serves-templemarker-the-magicians-tv)!


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